The internet is getting better and better at curating material for you. This is purely because of advertising. If you create something with a broad appeal, something that could apply to a large audience, you will make little to no impact. In the late 20th Century you might have received some attention with a broad message, but as we now have an inconceivably large amount of content competing for attention only the most focused of topics and initiatives will pierce through the roaring wall of noise between you and your audience.

Targeting a large audience is tempting. Logic tells you that if you could just get a sliver of the pie it would still be substantial. But if you can’t actually reach anyone, or even pique their interest, because your message is too broad to compete, then the initial audience size is irrelevant. Reaching for the stars and landing on a cloud doesn’t apply here. You will just keep staring at the stars in frustration wondering why your feet haven’t even left the ground.

You need to drill down to a very specific level so that your content can seem personally created for one individual. People need this level of customization in order to take action. Building in this way from the outset will give you an advantage over the competition because you are not entering into the general fray. You are sidestepping the competition and reaching out directly to the audience you want to help.

The first focus is incredibly broad and unless you have a household name (or at least a prominent name in photography) then your site will be pitted against the rest of the entire industry, which is completely saturated.

As we move down the list, we are getting more and more specific about our educational offering and our content becomes increasingly appealing towards the targeted audience of portrait photographers who work in the theatre/film industry and have an interest in female skin re-touching. If that was your area of interest, wouldn’t you dig a bit deeper to find out what that course had to offer?

How about another example, one with which I am very familiar:

Guitar Lessons

Beginner Guitar Lessons

Acoustic Beginner Guitar Lessons

Bluegrass Acoustic Beginner Guitar Lessons

Beginner Bluegrass Strumming Patterns for Acoustic Guitar

The same drilling down of specificity is present, and now I am appealing to my audience’s stage of development in addition to a specific genre (bluegrass) and component of that genre (strumming).

Once again, if you were a beginner guitarist interested in bluegrass this would grab your attention. Furthermore, the specificity of “strumming patterns” gives the him a clear focus of what they are going to learn, which ties into results based learning.

If you are hesitating to drill too deeply, so deep that there will be nobody there, then consider two things:

Firstly, the internet is large, huge, gigantic. Every time I am on a plane, looking down on sprawling cities as they pass underneath, I try and record the magnitude of the world we live in (I always seem to forget the scope a day later). Several hundred million people are eligible to receive your message. And, out of all those people, don’t you think there might be just 1,000 that are interested in learning about your specific topic? Yes.

Secondly, if in fact you are in a field where there is no-one currently serving your potential audience, then yes, feel free to go for a broader audience. With the proliferation of online teaching, a vacant space probably means that there is no audience available to build. However, there is always the off chance you have found a group of people that are not being served by anyone.

Drill Baby Drill

The first part of drilling down has to do with what you can offer. The second part has to do with who you are going to serve. Your niche audience.

To help your niche audience you need to understand them. You need to know what problems they have that you can solve. You need to know what kind of language they use so you can speak their language. You need to know everything about them. You need to build an avatar.

There are several key reasons why you might not take the leap into online teaching. Fear is a big one. In this chapter I will show you why your fears are misguided and mistakes are useful.

Lions, Tigers, Bears. Oh My!

Dating girls was always a daunting prospect for me when I was younger. Well, let me be more specific. I was petrified of asking girls out.

Rejection, embarrassment, humiliation… the usual fare. It wasn’t until I was in my late twenties and living in New York when I had a bit of an awakening.

I was out with a group of new found friends with whom I didn’t know too well. Among these new friends was a lovely woman whom I had never met before and with whom I had no real connections. Contrary to the more insular living situations I had been in before, New York City afforded an anonymity that was reassuring. Any kind of embarrassment or rejection would be suffered only once instead of potentially re-living it on a regular basis in a small community. The idea of hiding among 8 million other New Yorkers gave me some confidence.

After some nice conversation, I plucked up some courage and asked her out. She said, “yes” Then, the next day cancelled via text. I could make the story a little longer, but the story is not the point. The point is that after all those years of never asking out someone “cold”, I realized that all the things I had been fearing were really not that bad. I wasn’t shattered; my ego wasn’t destroyed. It was fine. In fact, the feeling that remained was one of regret as I thought back to all the times I could have made the leap but didn’t because I was afraid.

Fear is a funny thing in the modern world. We are still using primitive systems in our brain to decipher what we should be afraid of. Once it was fierce animals, and now it is an attentive audience. The infamous “flight or fight response”, which could have helped us in the jungle, now makes us fearful of public speaking. Fear is also the number one reason you will not undertake online education.

Longwinded segue way? Yes. But performing in public, speaking in public, even asking someone out on a date are common experiences we share. Not so many have found out how un-threatening it is to teach online.

People Aren’t Going To Like What I do

You’re right. People are not going to like what you do. People are also going to love what you do. The vast majority that come across your work simply won’t care.

You need to come to terms with this right now, and furthermore, you need to embrace it. If you try and please everybody, you are going to end up pleasing nobody.

Teach for yourself, teach for your audience and tend to that small group of people who love what you do. It is counter intuitive at first but you are going to be more successful if you embrace your faults and play to your strengths.

I’m Not Good Enough

This is doubtful. I do believe that you should have a strong proficiency in your craft and also have teaching experience but perhaps not as much as you think. It can be a very convenient excuse to get out of teaching online to simply deride ourselves and say that we are not an “expert”.

I was once brought out to the Hamptons in Long Island NY to teach young children on a range of instruments. These were kids, and they were in the beginning stages of learning music. Teaching alongside me was an international conductor. A conductor! These kids didn’t need high level performers to help them at their stage. They needed teachers who were good at teaching music to kids!

Tempting as it may be, bringing in a seasoned expert is not always going to be the best way to help someone. There can be giant gaps of understanding between an artist working at a professional level and a beginner, not to mention the fact that just because you are an expert in your field does not necessarily mean you are an effective teacher. It just doesn’t work like that.

If you have little or no teaching experience, I would recommend getting yourself in amongst some beginners. You will find it surprising what kind of information helps them and what questions they ask. Moreover, you will start to understand your audience by observing the teaching process in a more objective manner.

What kind of questions are being asked? How are they phrased? Are your responses helpful? What order do these questions come in?

To put it bluntly, you only need to be a few steps ahead of someone else in order to help them. The more experience and knowledge you have to offer, the more effective you can be, but don’t let fear get in your way by thinking that you are not good enough.

Mistakes and Failure

To make a mistake signifies that you are trying. You are taking a leap. To fail means that you have the opportunity to do it again and do it better. Both of these should be a positive sign rather than a negative.

Through the theonlinemusicteacher.com I am trying to help people like you navigate through unchartered waters. Around the world there are many other successful entrepreneurs passing on their advice too. However, there is always going to be ground you will have to cover yourself. With the right attitude this foray into the dark will be the most powerful learning experience you will have, even though it might feel like aimless fumbling.

There is something exciting to me about making mistakes. You might find hidden treasure.

Through the process of trial and error, you will discover hidden secrets about yourself, your teaching, your audience and your craft. These hidden truths can only be found via mistakes. Perhaps it is a way to explain a fundamental concept, a series of exercises that teaches more effectively than others, or better yet a way of teaching that synchs with your personality.

If you haven’t realized it yet, I am trying to turn the table on mistakes. They are not to be avoided but celebrated and observed with pride.

Reputation

Have you ever questioned your title? Painter, singer, guitarist, animator, writer… these titles fit quite well as a student because it takes up the majority of our time. After university, however, our time can be largely occupied by making a living. All of a sudden we draw into question if we are still an artist. If we look at our calendar it seems like we are more of a teacher, barista, waiter, bartender… It can make us do a double take at our own identity.

When I started making an impact online I wondered whether my friends and colleagues would think differently of me. I was hyper sensitive to any criticism and spent too much time checking stats on my website. What became evident over time is that, just like I mentioned before, most people just don’t care. I could spend hours agonizing whether I said the “right” thing in a blog post and when I talked with colleagues, they either thought it was fine or had no idea what I was talking about.

Know that your identity is multifaceted, and it changes over time. To focus on just one aspect of your career, the one that makes you feel like an “artist”, will take you down. The modern creative needs a diverse skill set and you can change hats depending on your given situation.

Nobody cares more about your reputation than you. Remember that.

Round Up

There are other facets of fear we could explore, but really it comes down to an understanding of what the real situation is. The fears you have about teaching online are largely unfounded. They are overwhelming and crippling at the beginning only to subside after several courageous months of lattes and laptop time.

Making money as a musician is difficult. And, after several years of teaching, gigging, and the occasional concert, it can become demoralizing to think that your financial situation will always be so limited.

I want to share with you a solution to this problem. It is a way to make money from teaching online, and unlike one to one lessons, you can maintain the schedule you want and grow your online audience to thousands.

This solution is not for everyone, and it may not be for you either.

3 Important Questions Before We Start

Do you already have experience teaching your instrument?

Do you have patience and the temperament to work online with heavy computer use?

Do you have a passion for teaching?

If you answered yes to all three questions above, then I think you are in for an exciting ride with online teaching. This could change your life and open up some possibilities you hadn’t even thought of.

If you answered “no” to any of the above questions, this may not be for you. Let me explain:

Firstly, to teach online using multimedia as your communication tool, you will need to have experience with teaching music. Experience will bring you the ability to address questions before they are asked. Experience will teach you how to work with a wide range of learning styles. Experience will teach you a whole range of skills that you should not deny your online students.

Patience and perseverance? You are going to need these in bucketloads. Online education is a marathon, not a sprint, and you are going to be relying heavily on technology. So, I suggest that you are amenable to that, or even better, you enjoy working with computers and technology.

Finally, I want to say that all the patience and perseverance in the world won’t be enough if you don’t actually have a passion for teaching. Just as your passion for music carried you through thousands of hours of practice, so too will it carry you though teaching music online.

Ok, for those of you still with us. You are in for an adventure.

What it can do for you financially

In the grand scheme of things, this is not the most important aspect, but I think it might be what interests you right now.

Online teaching has a few different models that you can use, but they all are better than the one you are probably using right now. One on one teaching essentially trades time for money. You provide the student with an hour of your time and you receive money for the lesson.

There are only so many hours in the day and even fewer where you can teach with focus and energy. This business model is limited and it has no room for scale. It also has the regular trappings of a locked schedule (that is normally dictated by the students or their parents rather than you), and geographic limitation.

Teaching online allows you to leverage your teaching to reach hundreds, thousands of students. It frees up your time because you are not repeating yourself to each individual student, and it can bring in a lot of money.

The money you can earn teaching music online directly correlates to how many people you can help. If you are teaching ten students online, you will have a nice supplement to pay rent. If you are teaching one hundred, then you can free up time for practice by dropping bad students or quitting that barista job. If you are teaching more than one hundred, you are starting to look at a full time income, while still remaining in control of your time.

The financial rewards from teaching music online can be wonderful, they can change your life. But there are more things to come.

What it can do for you artistically

More time means more art.

One of the many guitar jokes out there goes like this:

A guitarist wins the lottery and is asked by a local reporter what she is going to do? She replies: I’ll keep gigging till the money runs out!

After leaving music school, you and I faced a stark reality about the “real world”. There are some nice gigs around, but it doesn’t support a family or pay for health insurance. Furthermore, the gigs that bring in money are rarely gigs that bring artistic fulfillment. They bring wallet fulfillment.

As sad as it is to admit being a musician is a financial drain, its true. Teaching music online can support your art, it can give you the most precious of gifts that only gains value after music school : time.

What it can do for you as a teacher

Teaching music online will impact a large group of people. You can help hundreds of people around the world bring music into their life, you can give inspiration to thousands! It sounds cheesy, almost like a lie, but it is one of the most rewarding aspects about teaching online. More than the money, the sense of purpose and direction will improve your life.

I have had a lot of success with online teaching and I get asked on a regular basis how I did it. Well, here is the answer, it is for you and anyone else who is interested. After all of the success I have enjoyed I feel it is almost an obligation for me to pass on the knowledge.

What I have to offer you is a book. It is called Teach Your Passion : A Guide For Creative People Who Want To Teach Online

The Musician’s Advantage Online

There are many aspiring online teachers out there who face a large hurdle from the very outset of their project.

The first hurdle is not knowing what they are going to teach. Perhaps they have some specific skills, or a general knowledge in a few areas but rarely have they mastered a skill to a level where it becomes an obvious choice.

This is the musician’s first advantage. We have mastered a skill and (hopefully) by this point we have had experience teaching this skill to others. We are already off to a good start.

The second hurdle, and this is something that can ultimately cripple an online business, is making sure that you are passionate about what you are teaching.

Being engaged, excited, and passionate about your subject is absolutely crucial to success if you want to have a thriving online teaching business. For us, it is likely that we are already quite passionate about what we do.

Do be careful, however, to choose a path that you can sustain. One that will continue to keep you interested in a subject and happy to spend time teaching it to others.

Early on, we might have our eyes on the most obvious of targets. If you are a guitarist, then beginner pop guitar is the biggest pool of students. Likewise for a piano player, the bigger genres like pop and jazz seem appealing. But just because they are the largest, most competitive, groups doesn’t mean that they are right for you.

The real trick to success in this business is perseverance.

You are only going to persevere in you online teaching if you truly care about your topic.

For this reason, you should choose the topic that inspires you, not the topic that appears most lucrative.

If you happen to be interested in a narrow topic, then others will be too. Moreover, they will sense your enthusiasm and find it encouraging.

We have these two great advantages: being highly skilled at our craft, and knowing what it is we want to teach. Be sure not to get carried away with the initial scope of your project and focus in on a specific group of people that you want to serve. In the end, it is going to be your own sense of enjoyment and fulfillment that will carry you through to success.

How Much Students Are Used To Paying

Another advantage that musicians enjoy in the online teaching realm is the anchored mindset of the student.

A price “anchor” is something that sets a starting point for monetary value in the purchasers mind. For instance, if I offered you a car for 100,00 dollars I have anchored your perception of what it is worth. Your counter offer might be 70,000 but it is unlikely to be 5,000.

We get subjected to this all the time, you just may not realize it.

Have you seen the infomercials where they tell you the price then suddenly slash it in half?

“Get these two knives for $100, but today only you can get them for $50!”

This example has us already thinking of a value range of $100, and now that they are half price they seem a good deal! The truth is that the knives were always $50, but by placing the anchor in your head you now feel like you are getting a deal, and one that will expire soon (the concept of urgency).

The point is, as music lessons are already quite expensive in a one on one setting, music students have an anchored idea of how much they are going to pay. The even better news is that private music lessons are very expensive! So our leveraged teaching online, which we can offer to them at a fraction of the price, becomes an attractive proposition.

It is this simple. A year’s worth of lessons in New York? $3000. A year’s membership online? $300

This is a powerful selling point, and something we as musicians have in our favor when it comes to online teaching.

Ready to start teaching online?

As you continue to read throughout this site, I hope that you are convinced that teaching music online is a wonderful opportunity for musicians to help people and make an income.

Leverage your teaching and help thousands of students rather than just a handful.

The traditional model of teaching music, in a private studio setting, is to exchange time for money. A 30 minute lesson costs Z and a one hour lessons costs X.

This is a simple proposition and it makes sense on several levels. The student gets personal attention, it is easy to keep track of time and also predict a weekly or monthly income. The problem with this model is that it is wasteful.

How many times do you find yourself explaining the same fundamental concept to students? Posture, hand position, phrasing, articulation… there are plenty of examples where you could easily record the information and save yourself the repetition involved in this type of teaching.

Furthermore, on the student’s part, they may not be ready to absorb this information. So, even if you have delivered the right teaching at the right time if the student is not receptive or ready right there and then, it will be wasted.

For these two reasons I encourage you to leverage your teaching by teaching music online.

What is leverage?

The idea of leverage for our online teaching purposes is to create a lesson that contains specific information, and use that lesson to teach multiple students at the same time (and continually over time) in place of repeating the same information to each individual. The most obvious example of this is a method book, or a text book. These house carefully curated lessons and texts that impact students all over the globe and also over vast swaths of time. With the advent of accessible multimedia technology we now have the ability to make what are essentially super charged text books in the form of online courses. Text, audio, video, multimedia, and progressive lessons combine to make a powerful teaching tool. Add to this the ability to interact through forums, group chats, and webinars and you have a modern form of teaching that leverages your skills and teaching.

This article is leveraged. I am writing it now, and several thousand people will read it over time.

Leverage Everything and Create An Online Music Teaching Business

The idea of leverage should be quite clear to you know. What might not be so clear is the immense possibility that this idea has when applied to other facets of teaching online.

Email autoresponders

Drip content lessons

Interactive communities of students

Digital downloads

Courses

Membership tites

Group video calls for teaching

Recurring payments

One off payments

Marketing

The list goes on and on. Once you start to leverage your materials online you can scale your work to reach larger and larger audiences. With a large audience, you have growing opportunities to serve your audience and also share your music.

Do you have any ideas of how you could leverage your work online? Share your ideas below in the comments: